TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. When U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader last month, some Americans weren't just watching the news. They were waiting for a payout after wagering on the ayatollah's fate on a prediction market site called Kalshi. When he died, Kalshi refused to pay, citing fine print that excluded death as a qualifying outcome. Thousands of bettors are now suing for $54 million. This isn't the first time a real-world crisis has become a windfall for online bettors. Days before U.S. forces stormed Venezuela, an anonymous account on the platform Polymarket wagered tens of thousands of dollars that President Nicolás Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of February. When Maduro was captured, that anonymous bettor walked away with more than $400,000 in profit. That story stopped my guest, writer McKay Coppins, cold. By that point, he was already four months into a reported experiment for The Atlantic, spending an entire NFL season gambling to understand what America's sports betting boom is doing to the country. He thought he understood the terrain - the apps, the addiction, the game-fixing scandals. But the Maduro bet pointed to something bigger - a new relationship with gambling where everything is potentially a wager, from sports to elections, award show winner outcomes, even tomorrow's weather. His piece explores the personal and societal cost of these bargains. Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and his piece is called "Sucker: My Year As A Degenerate Gambler." It's available on The Atlantic's website today and is the cover story of the magazine's April issue. And, McKay Coppins, welcome to FRESH AIR.
MCKAY COPPINS: Thanks for having me.
MOSLEY: Well, what a title, first of all...
COPPINS: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: ...Which we will get into. But, you know, what was so interesting about this experiment is not only the experiment itself but that you are a Mormon, which means that gambling is off limits, and yet here you are doing this experiment. What made you want to spend a season doing this?
COPPINS: Well, it started as an assignment to basically look into and write a reported piece about the explosive growth of the sports betting industry in America and what it's doing to the culture, right? And as I was kind of making my reporting plans, I ticked off all the boxes that you would expect. I wanted to talk to people who struggled with gambling addiction. I wanted to talk to the executives at the big sportsbooks. I wanted to talk to athletes and try to understand the issue from all their perspectives.
But my editors kind of at the very beginning said, well, you know, you really should try to experience the phenomenon firsthand. And when I told them, you know, that's fine, but I have certain religious constraints - you know, my faith prohibits me from gambling - they came up with this sort of spiritual work-around, which is kind of ridiculous, but it did work out. They basically proposed that they would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. They would cover my losses, and we would split any winnings 50/50. And the idea was to try to simulate the kind of emotional investment in gambling that the average sports gambler has. But because it wasn't my money, their theory was, well, God will approve of it (laughter), which I will say, I ran that idea by my bishop just to see what he thought. And he sort of tentatively gave his blessing, even if he wasn't wild about the idea.
MOSLEY: Well, we're going to get into the outcome of this experiment. I'm going to make the audience wait to hear whether you had any winnings, but I want to go inside of the experiment. So you've got this $10,000. It is the beginning of the NFL game season, and you've downloaded these apps. DraftKings is one. It's one of the biggest online sports betting apps in the country. How did you decide what to bet on and where?
COPPINS: Well, the first game I was kind of flying blind because I had never gambled before. And while I'm a sports fan, I had never really bet on sports in any meaningful way, you know, maybe aside from little small wagers with my brother or something. And so I remember that first night, when the first game was about to start, kind of scrolling through DraftKings in this kind of state of wide-eyed bewilderment. You know, I didn't know any of the terms - profit boosts, alternative spread, moneyline. These were not words that I really knew. And I was almost kind of punching in bets at random just to see what would happen. Eventually, I developed a slightly more sophisticated approach. I learned the basic betting math. I learned the terminology. And I also consulted with a sort of gambling guru, Nate Silver, who is a well-known statistics nerd and journalist who is a longtime gambler and kind of taught me some of the best practices.
MOSLEY: Yeah. I mean, he actually looked at your first week of bet slips and immediately said to you, oh, no.
(LAUGHTER)
COPPINS: Yeah. He actually started laughing as he was looking at my bet slips, and it was a surprisingly emasculating experience. But, you know, the thing that he told me was, like, you are gambling like a recreational bettor, which was literally true but I also took to be a withering insult. He was basically saying, look, you have to understand the basic economics of sports betting. The sportsbook on any given bet charges you about 4.5%. So in order to just break even, it's not enough to win 50.1% of your bets. You have to win 52.5% of your bets, and that's before taxes. So it's even more, right? So the whole thing is already slightly rigged against the average gambler.
And then, you know, as he looked through those early bet slips, he said, one of the key mistakes you're making in this first week is that you're only using DraftKings. To really have any chance of coming out ahead when you're gambling on sports - it's a game of kind of exploiting microscopic edges, so you have to shop for the best lines on any given game. You have to look at all the different sportsbooks, see what the lines are, see what the vig is. That means, like, how much they're charging you for a given bet. So one book might charge you $110 to win a hundred. Another might only charge you $106. And so you have to really pour over all these numbers and make kind of the most rational bets that you can.
But the thing that he said to me in that conversation that kind of floored me was when I asked him, if I'm starting with $10,000, what would be a successful season, right? And I was expecting him to say, well, if you win $15,000, then you can count that as a win. What he said to me was - he was almost confused by the question. He said, if you win one penny, you will be in the top 2% of sports bettors.
MOSLEY: That makes me so nervous. Oh, my gosh.
(LAUGHTER)
COPPINS: And you know what? It should have made me more nervous, but that was my first experience with the kind of delusion of the sports bettor because I remember he said that, and he walked through all the - you know, the facts. He said, look, almost everybody loses money. That's just how this industry works. If you gamble for long enough, you will lose money unless you're in a very small percentage of people who are either using inside information or really good proprietary models or are just really lucky.
MOSLEY: Man.
COPPINS: And my reaction should have been, oh, I'm not going to make money doing this. But I had this kind of irrational belief that I would beat the odds, that I would be in that 1 or 2% of gamblers - for no reason. I had no reason to believe that. But even though I intellectually understood what he was saying, I kind of was filled with this irrational confidence.
MOSLEY: Well, McKay, I mean, that is the psychology of gambling. We always feel like we might be the lucky one. And in general, gambling on sports isn't new. But what you are describing in this piece and as you talk about all of the different apps, it feels categorically different from what most of us grew up understanding gambling to be, which is a trip to Vegas or March Madness, which we're in right now. Or a friendly bet with a friend or your brother, as you mentioned. Something has changed. Can you give us a sense of just how big this has gotten?
COPPINS: Yeah. I mean, just to give you a sense of how quickly and how much this industry has grown, in 2017, Americans legally wagered about $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number had risen to at least $160 billion. It's almost impossible to overstate how dramatically this industry has kind of taken off.
MOSLEY: This all traces to several moments over the last few years, one going back to 2012. Then New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed the Sports Wagering Act, which was a state law that legalized sports betting at the state's casinos and racetracks. The league took him to court, and then the case landed in the Supreme Court.
COPPINS: Yeah, that's right. And it's interesting. I talked to Chris Christie about this. And he said, at the time, he signed this bill because he was trying to help the sort of flagging economy of Atlantic City. And he recalled just this absolute outpouring of outrage and indignation, specifically from the professional sports world. The leagues were just, you know, completely outraged that he was trying to expand legal sports betting. The leagues were dead set against it.
And a consensus had formed over, really, the past century in America that gambling posed an existential risk to organized sports because, you know, there had been these kind of high-profile scandals, right? The point-shaving scandals in college basketball, Shoeless Joe Jackson in the 1919 World Series. That had basically convinced the league commissioners that if legal sports betting expanded too much, it would undermine the credibility of the games. And that was the consensus all the way up until the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 to overturn the federal ban on sports betting, which basically opened the door for states to legalize it if they wanted to.
And very quickly, dozens of states followed New Jersey's lead and started legalizing it, partly because they were seduced by the possibility of the tax revenue that could be generated and partly because these online sports books, which were scaling up exponentially and, you know, basically printing cash, had very good and effective lobbying operations that worked on state legislatures all across the country and convinced them to legalize it. And in very short order, sports betting went from being something that you did in Las Vegas and a couple of other places, at a physical location inside a casino or a racetrack, to now something almost everybody can do on their phone with just one tap.
MOSLEY: Right. I mean, what's almost comical about this is that the professional sports leagues, they fought this for years. They even testified before Congress, calling gambling an existential threat to sports. The NFL and the NBA did. And then the moment that the court ruled against them, they kind of ran towards the money.
COPPINS: (Laughter) They really did.
MOSLEY: Like, how quickly did that reversal happen?
COPPINS: Almost overnight. They had, you know, been so opposed to sports betting. They had used all this kind of righteous language about how bad it was for the integrity of the game, how bad it was for athletes. And then, as soon as it became legal in states, they realized that there was a huge opportunity here. And, I mean, this also corresponded with organized sports in America kind of facing a number of problems, right?
TV ratings were beginning to dip for the live broadcasts, as viewers had more options with streamers and whatnot. They also were dealing with the fact that younger fans were beginning to drift away. And they saw sports betting as a way to kind of engage younger fans, revitalize public interest and, you know, to bring a lot more money into the leagues by partnering with these very, you know, cash-flushed sports books.
MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit more about that after the break. I'm talking with McKay Coppins, whose piece in The Atlantic traces what happened when he spent an NFL season betting $10,000. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOWARD FISHMAN SONG, "DIRTY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm talking with McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic. His April cover story, "Sucker: My Year As A Degenerate Gambler," follows his season inside America's sports betting boom and what happened when the FBI started pulling on threads at the same time he was holding active bets.
So I want to talk a little bit about maybe what could be called an integrity crisis, because while you were gambling your way through this NFL season, something else was happening simultaneously. Walk us through what the FBI was uncovering, because it wasn't just one thing that they were looking at. It was several scandals all at once.
COPPINS: Yeah. In October of last year, the FBI announced the arrests of more than 30 people. And actually, it was two different interlocking gambling schemes. One of them had to do with rigged high-stakes poker games that involved, allegedly, the Mafia. And the other one had to do with NBA players allegedly rigging outcomes in games to help gamblers. So in one of the examples, Terry Rozier, who is an NBA player - he was playing for the Charlotte Hornets - was accused of tipping off associates that he would leave a game early with a foot injury so that gamblers could place more than $200,000 on under prop bets, basically saying he would score fewer points, make fewer rebounds, fewer assists, et cetera.
And Terry Rozier wasn't alone. The implicated people in this big, revealed scheme included NBA players, a retired Hall of Fame point guard-turned-head coach, and several people in the Mafia. We should note that they pleaded not guilty. But what was fascinating about that scandal was that the reaction from the people I was talking to, who are experts on the sports betting industry - gambling, sports - were saying that they're convinced this is just the tip of the iceberg, that we are going to see much, much more in the coming months and years as sports betting continues to spread and grow in popularity.
MOSLEY: Well, there seems to be a conflict of interest at the heart of this. The leagues - the NFL, the NBA, the MLB - they now have financial stakes in the online betting platforms. ESPN also once had its own betting operation. I mean, these are institutions we're supposed to trust to keep the games clean, and really, can they? Because it seems like a tightrope.
COPPINS: It is a tightrope, for sure. I mean, it is fascinating to me that these sports leagues that were once so intent on maintaining a distance between themselves and gambling are now embracing it so fully that they almost have no ability to meaningfully crack down on it, right? I mean, when scandals like this come out, you hear the league commissioners say all the right things. They say, you know, we're going to continue to root these things out, we have a zero tolerance policy, etc., etc. But the nature of their relationship with the sportsbooks means that they are inherently conflicted.
And that's true of sports media, as well. The sports media outlets that should be acting as watchdogs on this issue in particular are taking millions and millions of dollars from gambling sites, right? In fact, I was hard-pressed to find many popular sports media outlets that were not somehow in partnership with or taking sponsorship deals from gambling platforms. The - you know, when this scandal broke and ESPN was covering it, the producers at ESPN had to scramble to take down advertisements on the screen for their own sportsbook.
MOSLEY: There's a lot of you in this piece, of course, 'cause you did the experiment. But while you were reporting on this in real time and holding these active bets, there was a moment in the piece that the night the NBA indictments dropped, you found yourself genuinely wondering if the referees had rigged the game you had lost money on. And this is notable for you because, as you write, you're not usually prone to paranoid thinking. How do you process that? What did it mean...
COPPINS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...That gambling kind of got you there?
COPPINS: I was surprised by the degree to which my kind of perception of organized sports, their - the credibility of the sports was sort of warped by having money on the games, right? I remember in this one particular game, it was a Oklahoma City Thunder game, and my bet lost. And immediately, I pulled up Twitter and started scrolling through to see if anybody else had the kind of similar suspicions that I had about the referees, you know, perhaps being, you know, tainted in some way or conflicted. And sure enough, there was a stream of angry gamblers saying, you know, the refs clearly had money on this game, I'm disgusted, calling on the commissioner of the NBA to resign.
And what kind of worried me was that, as you said, I'm not really prone to conspiracy theories. You know, I'm a journalist. I try to be very careful about finding evidence for the things that I believe. But I was immediately sucked into that same kind of paranoid thinking, and it kind of made me realize that to gamble on sports in 2026 is to almost inevitably become a conspiracy theorist. You can't help but wonder, are there athletes who are rigging this game? Are there refs involved? Are the coaches involved? And every time one of these scandals is revealed, it further exacerbates those kind of conspiracy theories.
And there's actually a lot of survey data on this. You know, majorities of Americans now say that they believe that athletes occasionally change their performance to help gamblers. The - you know, majorities of Americans say that sports gambling has decreased the integrity of the game. And that actually could be an existential threat to organized sports if something doesn't change.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with McKay Coppins, whose Atlantic cover story follows a season inside America's sports betting explosion. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DON STIERNBERG'S "FEVER")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic. His piece "Sucker: My Year As A Degenerate Gambler" is the cover story of the magazine's April issue - a reported confession of sorts about what happened when he spent an NFL season betting $10,000 of his employer's money, and what it revealed about an industry that has quietly colonized American sports, media and now politics.
OK, we're going to get back to sports, but you also write about these prediction markets, and they represent something categorically different. How did we go from a college basketball player taking a bribe to someone betting on a U.S. military operation?
COPPINS: The platforms that are used to bet on outcomes in politics, in, you know, geopolitics, in war, in culture are different from the online sportsbooks that I spent most of my experiment using. They're called predictive markets. Polymarket and Kalshi are the most popular ones. But they operate slightly differently, and by doing so, they've managed to kind of get around a lot of the federal regulation that exists for online sportsbooks. Rather than taking bets themselves, they allow people to invest in predictive outcomes as though they're investing in positions in, like, a derivative market, right?
And so you can buy a position in a question like will Gaza experience a famine this year? - as macabre and kind of insane as that sounds. You can invest in a position like will a nuclear bomb be detonated by a certain date? How many people will be deported from the United States in 2026? Will Donald Trump declare martial law before leaving office? These are actually all live bets that you can make on these platforms.
And what's striking about it is that in some ways, they feel like the logical endpoint of the sports betting explosion, you know? The entire American population over the last several years has basically been conditioned to get used to gambling on their phones. And why limit yourself to sports, right? It is making everything more abstract. It's turning all of American life into, like, a Las Vegas table game where - you know, where there's always this kind of glittering mirage of profit that you're chasing, when in reality, it's designed to sort of demoralize and crush every regular person who plays.
MOSLEY: Well, I mean, the biggest concern - let's take the Maduro bet that I mentioned in the introduction. An anonymous account wagers tens of thousands of dollars days before our forces moved on Venezuela, and that anonymous person or account walked away with $400,000 in profit. That is either extraordinary luck or someone knew something. So how seriously should we be taking the insider-trading question when it comes to predictive markets and basically government actors?
COPPINS: I mean, it's almost impossible to see that outcome and not assume that the person who made the bet had some kind of insider information, right? And we have seen actually a number of examples of this since then. What kind of surprised me, though, is when I first saw that bet on Maduro, the way it played out, I assumed that it would be kind of treated like an example of abuse, right? That there was some insider trading, that the platforms would crack down on it, that the gambler would be rooted out, kicked off the platform and it would be remembered as kind of a blip in the story of these predictive markets.
What I didn't realize until I started playing around with them myself and talking to people who are involved in these platforms is that insider trading is actually kind of built into the whole enterprise. There are several people involved in these predictive markets who actually will tell you point-blank that they encourage insider trading because insider trading increases the predictive utility of the platforms, right?
And I think to understand their vision is important here. They argue that, you know, the digital public square has, for the last couple of decades, existed primarily on social media, which has devolved into a cesspool of AI slop and rage bait and trolling and people kind of not acting in good faith. And the argument that they will make is that if you migrate the public square from social media over to these predictive markets, people will be incentivized to take positions based on what they genuinely believe and what they actually know. And they would point to the example of the potential military or government insider who took his position based on what he knew to be true as an example of these markets working. Now, you can track insiders like him - these anonymous accounts - and see what positions they're taking, and you might get a pretty good sense of what's going to happen in the next stage of, for example, the war in Iran.
Now, I think a lot of people listening to this will say that's incredibly cynical and kind of almost dystopian. And I, frankly, would agree with you. But the people who run these platforms are not backing away from the idea of, you know, allowing insider trading on their platform. I will say Kalshi, I think, technically prohibits it, but there is very little evidence that they try to root it out. Polymarket actively encourages it.
MOSLEY: Right. Like, how would a platform actually discourage it? What are the rules in place on Kalshi, for instance, to stop it?
COPPINS: Well, I mean, Kalshi could, for example, at the very least, try to - in flagrant examples of insider trading, like the Maduro case that you just mentioned, they could ban the person who started that account, right? They could kick them off the platform. But is that really in their interest? If their belief is that these predictive markets - and they've said this - will replace public-opinion polling, certainly commentary from political pundits, as the most useful barometer for what's going to happen next in a public event, then why would they want to ban them?
By the way, you've also seen these predictive markets make deals with major media organizations like CNN, which is now featuring Kalshi's predictive markets in their election coverage. And so, if anything, they're kind of being rewarded for having these insiders trade based on the information they have.
MOSLEY: For people who are betting on world events on a site like Kalshi, can you explain how the site actually works?
COPPINS: So if you go onto Kalshi or Polymarket, you'll be presented with different categories that you can click on - culture, politics, sports, whatever - and then it'll provide you with, like, a menu of bets that you can make. But what you're doing there is rather than betting against the house, as you would with DraftKings or a typical casino, you are actually buying a position from somebody else who's using Polymarket, right? And so if you want to bet that there will be regime change in Iran by the end of April, for example, you might find that the price to buy into that position is 56 cents per share, but you are buying that position from somebody else who wants to sell that position. So it operates more like a derivatives market than it does a casino, even though, in effect, you're doing the same thing. You're gambling.
MOSLEY: You know, with Kalshi, I mentioned how they're being sued for not paying off a bet on the death of the ayatollah. What are your thoughts on this? Because they also seem to be fine with insider betting. So death is the redline.
COPPINS: Well, this is one of many cases where the predictive markets are different than the sportsbooks. If a sportsbook refuses to pay out a bet and it becomes controversial for some reason, there are existing regulatory bodies that will receive complaints from gamblers, look at the evidence and basically rule on whether the sportsbook has to pay out that bet. And these bodies have existed for a long time in Las Vegas. They're actually very powerful. But, you know, there is a regulatory framework around this stuff. The predictive markets are really even compared to the online sportsbooks operating in a Wild West.
And I think it's worth noting that under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had both opened investigations into Kalshi and Polymarket looking into whether they were disregarding or disobeying federal regulations, but all of that kind of ended when Donald Trump returned to office. Part of that is because the predictive markets figured out how to play the political game in Trump's Washington. Polymarket hired a former Trump adviser as its first Washington lobbyist. Both Polymarket and Kalshi added Don Jr. to their payrolls effectively, and the investigations were quietly closed. The companies have begun to scale up rapidly, and I think that they feel like they can operate with a certain degree of impunity.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is journalist McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE T SONG, "O.G. ORIGINAL GANGSTER")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we've been talking with McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, about his season of what he calls being a degenerate gambler and what it revealed about the exploding industry of online betting.
So, McKay, we talked earlier about how the Supreme Court opened this door, but let's talk a little bit about what is happening next at the government level because it wasn't like Congress has stepped in in any way with a plan for regulation. Kind of walk us through kind of what is sort of a regulatory vacuum that followed.
COPPINS: Right. Well, I spent some time talking to a Democratic congressman from New York named Paul Tonko, who kind of took on the cause of regulating sports betting several years ago when he first started seeing from his younger staffers that their social media feeds were filled with advertising from these online sportsbooks. And what he told me is that he was actually shocked when he saw them by how much they resembled the big tobacco ads, the cigarette ads from a generation earlier that have since been very heavily regulated. You know, they're very slick. They're very glossy. They feature celebrities and famous athletes. They're very clearly targeting younger people, trying to hook them so that they will become lifelong customers. And they are, as Congressman Tonko put it to me, selling a known addictive product. It is very well established that gambling and online sports betting can be addictive. And these sportsbooks are almost in kind of a Wild West moment where there's almost no regulation in - certainly not at the federal level in terms of how they can advertise, how they can track their users' behavior online.
And so, you know, he set out several years ago to start regulating this industry, and what he found was that there was very little appetite in Congress for taking on this issue. You know, he would talk to parents whose sons have gambled away their college tuition checks, and they would tell him, please do something about this. He would talk to politicians in the U.K. and Australia, which are countries that are kind of a few years ahead of us in terms of legalizing and popularizing online gambling. And they would all tell him, you need to crack down on this now. We wish we had taken this issue more seriously a few years ago. But then once he actually talked to his colleagues in Congress, he would kind of be met with blank stares. You know, they thought it was, like, a nice pet issue for him - didn't seem like it was super important. And he really struggled to gain traction with his legislation. Meanwhile...
MOSLEY: I don't understand this.
COPPINS: Oh.
MOSLEY: I'm sorry. I just have to step in to say I found this part of your reporting to be just really - I couldn't understand it, in part because gambling is, like, an age-old issue, that we understand that it is a weakness in the human condition in the same way that alcohol and tobacco, as you mentioned, can go off the rails. So even though it's in a new platform where it's in our phones and we can easily get to it, the issue of what gambling can cause and the destruction is very much proven.
COPPINS: Completely. I mean, I was actually pretty baffled by this myself, and I was baffled by why more politicians haven't taken this up as a cause. Clearly, gambling addiction is increasing in America. But, you know, why Congress hasn't taken it more seriously, I mean, I think there are a couple reasons. One is that it might be a generational issue. This is an issue that I think a lot of people thought that we had already solved as a country, right? Gambling addiction, of course, exists, and there have always been people who ruin their lives with this vice.
But, you know, again, up until a few years ago, it was relatively contained. You had to go to certain physical locations to gamble. Or you were doing it on the black market, but the number of people who were doing that was relatively small. And the average House of Representatives member is about 60 years old, which is well outside the DraftKings target demographic, right? But it is also the case that this industry is just flush with cash. It has a lot of money to spend on lobbying. It has a lot of money to spend on advertising. And it is also kind of a truism of politics that trying to take away a popular thing from your constituents is not very good politics.
MOSLEY: I mentioned to you right before we started that I have a 13-year-old son, who came home and told me that a classmate had bet on the Super Bowl. And they'd bet on two different sites, betting both teams, you know, one for one team and one for the other. That's what a 13-year-old mind would do.
COPPINS: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: And my first question was, isn't this illegal? Aren't there age restrictions?
COPPINS: There are, but they're very easy to get around. You know, and there are a number of scenarios where a young person might have access to online sports gambling. One common one is that fathers will set up a sports betting account with their sons as kind of a bonding exercise, right? They'll say, hey, I want my boy to watch the Sunday NFL games with me. This will entice him to take an interest. And the dad will kind of say, look, I'll cover the losses. And if we win anything, we'll split it, right?
But what happens is the dad then - you know, Sunday ends. The dad goes to work, whatever, and the son still has access to the account. And I talked to people who had crazy stories about young people getting deep, deep in gambling debt without their parents having any idea until they would get a phone call from somebody saying, hey, you owe me $5,000. And they would say, what are you talking about? They'd say, well, your son has racked up this big gambling debt. And somebody's got to pay it, right?
MOSLEY: And it's all happening digitally, you know, right?
COPPINS: A lot of it is happening digitally. Some of it's happening, you know, kind of in a more analog, old-fashioned way. But the key point here is that because it's almost impossible now to watch a sports game without getting bombarded with ads for sports gambling, because it's almost impossible to consume sports media without hearing your favorite sports media personality talk about the money lines and point spreads, I think that it's just much more in the culture, in the conversation. I think young people are much more fluent in the vocabulary of gambling than they were a generation ago.
MOSLEY: You interviewed the president of some of these sites. I think it was FanDuel and an executive of DraftKings. They both told you that their companies don't want revenue from people with gambling problems. But what we know about gambling is that it can be compulsive by nature. And then you add on top of that our phones are designed to keep us addicted. And then these platforms, as you laid out here, will allow you to virtually bet on anything at any hour of the day. You're going to get a snack, you're laying in your bed, all of that stuff. That is nearly a perfect recipe for exactly the kind of customer they claim they don't want.
COPPINS: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, like, I was skeptical of these sportsbooks' claims that they are committed to what they call responsible gaming. Even at the outset, I kind of figured that that was good PR. And then I spent time talking to some of these executives, and I think they really believe it, right? They will tell you, we have all these different policies that are designed to identify and slow down users who are exhibiting reckless and addictive behaviors. If people are really acting and gambling in reckless ways, we'll actually kick them off our platforms.
And they claim that they even have a self-interested reason for that. They say, we don't want any revenue from someone who has a gambling problem. If people are burning out too quickly, they're not going to be customers for very long. And, you know, there is actually a term of art for this in the industry. They call it loss smoothing. Gamblers, by the way, call it the slow bleed, which is basically (laughter)...
MOSLEY: Oh. Yeah.
COPPINS: If you lose money slow enough, you'll just keep losing money. But the reality is this entire industry revolves around a basic economic reality, which is that as much as 90% of the sportsbooks' revenue come from less than 10% of their users, right? And what that means is that if you actually took away the people who were gambling the most, the entire industry would collapse. It would be much, much less profitable. And so I can't help but be skeptical of any claims that these companies really don't want compulsive gamblers.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with McKay Coppins, whose Atlantic cover story follows a season inside America's sports betting explosion. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAY-Z AND BEYONCE SONG, "'03 BONNIE & CLYDE")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we've been talking with McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, about his season of what he calls being a degenerate gambler and what it revealed about the exploding industry of online betting.
How did you wean yourself off from these sites once you submitted the story?
COPPINS: Well, it was actually the morning after the Super Bowl, which the Super Bowl was supposed to mark the end of the gambling experiment, right? That was the culmination of the whole experience. And it was also what I had promised my wife - right (laughter)? - that once the NFL season ended, I would be done gambling. And, you know, once my employer's money wasn't in our bank account anymore, I would cut myself off.
I remember, though, the morning after the Super Bowl looking over, you know, my bets and looking through DraftKings and FanDuel. And my eye was kind of gravitating toward the March Madness bets, right? And I was looking at the odds, and I was like, I don't know, there are some pretty good bets I could make here. There's some pretty good odds for some of these teams. And then I remember looking through - I think it was Kalshi, and seeing the Oscars' odds, that, you know, you could bet on best actor, best picture.
And it just kind of dawned on me that morning that I wasn't going to be able to just, you know, easily walk away from this thing that had kind of consumed my life over the last five months. And so almost on impulse, honestly, I pulled up the self-exclusion form in Virginia. I Googled it, found it, and I quickly filled it out before I could talk myself out of it. And basically...
MOSLEY: What is that? Explain it. Yeah, explain it for those who don't know.
COPPINS: Yeah, yeah. The self-exclusion form is a form that most states that have legalized online sports betting offer, where if you think you are at risk of gambling addiction or you think you are becoming a problem gambler, you can fill out this form, submit it to the state and it legally prohibits online sportsbooks from taking your action. You will not be allowed to bet for a determined period of time. In Virginia, you can ban yourself for one year, five years or for life.
MOSLEY: You started off with $10,000 to bet with. What did you end with?
COPPINS: The answer is basically I lost everything. At the end of the season, I had lost $9,891.
MOSLEY: Wow. Yeah.
COPPINS: And, you know, as much as I tried to make this a realistic simulation of, you know, gambling, I was playing with a safety net, right? I always knew that I wasn't going to lose my own money in doing this. But the temptation to just keep going is really strong for gamblers. And any gambler will talk to you about this. Whether they're a gambling addict or just kind of a recreational gambler who does it a few times a year, all of them will tell you that there is this kind of reality-distorting effect that gambling has on you. It almost doesn't matter how much you lose. You convince yourself that the way to fix the problem is to gamble more. And that makes gambling different from pretty much every other vice.
MOSLEY: Can you watch a game now, or even watch something like the Oscars and just enjoy it without going to that mindset of who you'd gamble on?
COPPINS: It's harder than I would like to admit. I was just watching a Celtics game the other night with my son, and, you know, he was just enjoying it in kind of the purity of a young sports fan. And I was trying to get there with him, but in the back of my mind, I was like, man, I wonder what the spread is on this game.
(LAUGHTER)
COPPINS: I wonder what, you know, like, if I live bet it right now, you know, how much could I make? It's hard to kind of train your brain to forget all of that stuff. And, you know, I'm doing it cold turkey. I imagine it'll get easier, but there's no question that at the end of this experiment, it's going to take some time to fully, you know, deprogram my brain from thinking about gambling when I'm experiencing sports or really anything else, honestly.
MOSLEY: McKay Coppins, thank you so much for your article and for being an experiment in this conversation.
COPPINS: Happy to do it. Thank you.
MOSLEY: McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with Harrison Ford about his six-decade career, including his most recent role playing a therapist with Parkinson's in "Shrinking," or with writer Rhae Lynn Barnes about the hidden history of blackface, check out our podcast. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
